Shaping Our Assumptions

Thank you, Murray, and thank you, choir. Thank you, Bruce. And if you have your Bibles, would you turn with me to Luke, chapter 10? Luke, chapter 10. One of the favorite methods of Jesus in teaching was through parables.

And he would tell a story, and you would look at the person in the story. And over the process of time, the person you kept looking at eventually turned to be yourself. And he had a great way of telling those stories. And this is one of his favorite, or one that's mentioned more than any other parable, is probably the parable of the Good Samaritan. And so Luke is the only one that has written about this.

And this is in a large section of Luke as he writes from chapter nine all the way to chapter 19. And he's going. Jesus is on a journey, and his journey is to go to the cross. And on the way to the cross, he teaches disciples, and he teaches them through parables. He teaches them through situations.

And as they watch him, as he does things, then the disciples are supposed to be the one to say, this is how we should do that. Because he's going to go to heaven, and there he's going to stand and wait for one of these days when he comes back again. And until that day when he comes back again, we're in the process of winning people into the kingdom of God. And he's left us with that mission of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ in our churches and places we work, in our families, and whatever situation we found ourselves in, we're to be sharing the kingdom of God to those that are there and making a difference for Jesus Christ wherever we are. And so he's teaching his disciples.

He had been at a place in chapter nine called Caesarea Philippi, which is up at the top of Israel. And there. There's so much going on there that it's war and tension and. And everything is going on up there. But he wanted to spend that time with his disciple.

It's where the River Jordan comes out of the mountains there. And you can almost walk across where that little stream is, the River Jordan. And he asked them this. Who do people say that I am? Because we look at what people say and how they say it, and if we really kind of think about what they're trying to say, a lot of that reflects how we say and how we think about things.

And the title of my sermon is Shaping Assumptions. Because all of us have assumptions. You have opinions about people. You have things that stay there, and something's happened. And a lot of that comes from Our own sense of who we are.

And we kind of shape people in the way. With our assumptions, in the way that we think they are, whether they are or not. There's a term called confirmational bias. Confirmational bias is. Psychologists use this to say this is what I thought they were.

I knew that the whole time when I was at. I grew up in Central Baptist Church. And I remember when I was 8 or 9 years old, there was this lady in the church and there was this ordinance in Selma that you couldn't buy beer on Sunday. And so this lady had gone across the river and had bought some beer. And also the market over there had sold her this beer.

So it became a problem in the church. People began to think about her because she was one of the leaders in the wmu.

What do you think about the leader of the WMU who comes home with a can of beer? What do you think about that? Well, this is what she said. She bought the beer to wash her hair. That's what she said.

It was amazing to me how many opinions were there. Listen, I knew her, she's the sweetest lady you ever met. She leads in Bible studies and she knows what she's talking about. And I don't think she bought the beer. I think she was really true in what she said, buying the beer.

But there was another group, you know that other group. You have a member of the other group that's there.

I knew it. I knew it. She had a problem. I know she's got a problem. And all of a sudden we make an assumption.

And it was amazing to me how I was just an 8 or 9 year old kid, how some had assumptions about this and some had assumptions about this. Well, I never knew whether she bought the beer to wash her hair or not because I don't use beer to wash my hair. But anyway, there were these assumptions. Now look at the person next to you. What's your assumption of the person next to you?

That they look like they would buy beer on Sunday.

Assumptions.

They said of Jesus that he was a glutton. And they said of him that he was a beer drinker or an alcohol drinker. And they said of him that. That he has a demon. And the reason they said those things about him is because they were threatened by Jesus.

And when you're threatened, you kind of name somebody something else. And you look at them in different kind of eyes and you see them in different kind of perspective.

In the garden there was this snake and the snake was there. God said, do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge and Good and Evil. And he had planted it. Not so as he said, didn't say it's here, or maybe there may be over here. He said, this is where it is.

And he designated the place where the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was. He didn't hide it from him. He said, here it is. And he told them specifically, do not eat of that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And then the snake showed up and he found Eve in the garden.

And as Eve was in the garden, she was looking at that tree. It captured her attention. And it's amazing how those things were not supposed to do will capture our attention. And it had our attention. And so Satan began to say, he questioned and he said, did God really say that?

He just wants to keep you from having the best thing.

He took one assumption that she had and he gave it another assumption. And we have the wrong assumptions, we end up with the wrong kind of conclusion.

And she gave it to her husband. She gave it to her husband, like, here, eat. And like any other husband, he ate. Amen.

But that began what began? A contamination throughout the whole earth. And that contamination is very real.

I was listening to Taylor Swift for my sermon title today. By the way. Any of you ever have any Taylor Swift videos? I don't know if you have any Taylor Swift videos. Bruce doesn't even have any Taylor Swift video.

I know Murray doesn't have any Taylor Swift video, but she has. She won entertainer of the year. And not only she win entertainer of the Year, this is what she has a video. That's a number one video. And the name of it is Patient Zero.

And Patient Zero is about relationships that started bad and continue to grow bad. And patient zero is a medical term that comes out of the field of medicine. Said patient zero is the first one that contracted that kind of disease. And he has spread that disease throughout the whole world. Patient zero.

And you and I, Covid went through Covid. We said, Covid starts somewhere in China. And somebody in China went to the laboratory there and broke that vial. And what House spread it to this group and this group until finally it covered the whole world. Patient Zero, if you would look In Romans chapter 5, Paul writes about patient zero.

And he says, the first Adam, the first Adam brought sin and death throughout this whole world. It's contamination.

Is there any solution to that? Romans 5, Paul gives a solution. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, who is a patient zero that brings redemption into this world. He has redemption. It's the only solution in this world.

There is no other solution to the contamination that is in this world except through the redemption of Jesus Christ. Now look at Luke, chapter 10. If you have your Bibles and would you stand as we read just one or two verses and then I'll let you sit down, but you can't go to sleep. Amen. Verse 36.

It did. End of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus gives, how do we apply this? And he always lets you know that, what's the next step? He just doesn't leave you with an entertaining parable.

He says, okay, what is the next step? And at the end of that, to the lawyer that was there, he was the expert in reading the law. Jesus said this. Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the men who fell into the hands of the robbers?

So he puts a question back on the lawyer.

What's your answer to this situation? The one who showed mercy to him, he said.

Then Jesus said, go and do likewise. Now, before you sit down, turn to two people around you and say, go and do likewise. Would you do that? Just go and do likewise.

Now you may be seated.

Look back at the scripture in verse 17. We'll start there. That's a good place to start.

As Jesus is on the road to the cross, he knows what waits him there. It will be the hardest moment of his life.

It will be where God the Son and God the Father were separated for the first time in this world. And what separated them was mine and your sin.

If the cross had been the final answer, then we would have no hope.

Thomas Jefferson. And I really admire Thomas Jefferson. I really went to his home and read a lot of his stuff. He's a great writer. He's a terrible speaker, but he was a good writer.

And we have our Declaration of Independence, written by a great man who just uses the English so well. But Thomas Jefferson wrote a Bible. And in that Bible, he left out the miracles of Jesus. Not only did he leave out the miracles of Jesus, he left Jesus in the tomb. And that's the end of it.

That's the end of the story. But if that's the end of the story, then our loved ones are in a place not prepared by God.

And we will go to another place. I'll go to that same place.

That the hope of God's Word is that we have a Redeemer, and that he paid the price for my redemption and your redemption. And at Central Baptist Church, in the balcony where I was playing Hangman with a friend of mine, the preacher got up and preached about that.

And that afternoon I bowed my head by my mother's bed on third Avenue and invited Christ into my life. And he's been in there, been there ever since.

Now there are 72 disciples. It's grown from the 12 to the 72. One of those is going to be a. He's going to deny Jesus or turn him over. And this is how Judas dealt with his guilt.

See, once you sin against the Lord and deliver that, then that guilt and shame begins to build up. And that's a gift from God, having a. Having guilt.

But Judas took out, went out and hanged himself. Then Acts starts off with that. That's the way he dealt with his guilt. Now how do you deal with your guilt? Is there any other way you can deal with your guilt?

And God has given us the way, and that's through our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who takes the contamination upon himself and he heals our sin.

Judas worst act was not so much hanging himself or denying Christ or turn him over to the ruler. The worst sin is what he didn't do. He never asked Jesus for forgiveness.

If he had found his way to the cross and looked up at the Lord paying that price for him, then Jesus would have given him forgiveness. But the unpardonable sin is never asking for forgiveness.

Now, if you have your Bibles, look in verse 17. The return of the 72 had been on their first or second missionary activity. And they had seen Satan fall down from his place of authority. And they had seen that they had followed Jesus instructions. And as they had followed his instructions, they had seen people come to know the.

Come to know the kingdom of God in a very powerful way. And so he comes. They have this kind of celebration moment. In the middle of that celebration moment, a lawyer stood, expert in the law. Stood up.

So if you have the Bible, skip down to verse 25.

Then an expert in the law, and that's my new Bible I've gotten. So then an expert in the law, a lawyer, he stood up. And the reason he stood up, he wasn't in the discipleship group, he was outside the discipleship group. And he stood up in the midst of that. Because whenever Jesus taught his disciples, he invited all these people to come and be a part of that.

So here was this lawyer that showed up. Maybe he showed up from the Jerusalem group that came to test Jesus because they had their own kind of assumptions about Jesus.

And so he stood up in the middle of that. Jesus had been talking about Eternal life. And that's the most essential question in any religion. Where do you find eternal life? The Muslims say you fly airplanes in the building.

The Buddhists say you come like Buddha.

What is it that every religion has some kind of answer about where to find eternal life? Many of us say you can just do, you know, as long as your good things outnumber your bad things, then you will have eternal life. But the Bible never says that.

So what is eternal life? And this is what Jesus is going to teach them. Eternal life is something that happens at the end of time. And I've been here, many of you have been here. When we said goodbye to our loved one on this side of heaven, when God had a place for them on the other side of heaven.

Eternal life is there. At the end of this life, when we take our last breath at this life, eternal life is there. But eternal life happens when the kingdom of God happens on this earth. Over there, it's going to be permanent. Over here, it's going to be a temporary time that you have with God.

And there's a time when, I mean, if you ever had one of those times. Susan and I like to go look at the spirit sunset there on the. On the pier in Pharaoh. And boy, it's just so beautiful. And you can feel God's presence.

And heaven comes down and glory fills our soul.

But it's only a temporary thing.

I love hugging my grandchildren. They're great, but. But a real glory came when they hugged me back. Amen. And because I gave them a dollar, they hugged me back.

That's what grandparents do.

It's only a temporary thing. They grow up and they leave home and they never send any money back home. Amen. Maybe you've got some that have sent money back home. Mine never have sent money back home.

But we love being with them. And those are special times. Special times happen. Eternal life is the kind of thing where you feel God's presence and you say, whoa, this is a moment. But then life moves in and you move past that moment and you keep asking God, God, give me that moment.

Give me another moment. It can happen in church. It can happen in family relationship.

It can happen when you hear that still small voice touching your heart.

Now let's look back at the parable. Verse 26.

What is written in the law? He asked, and how do you interpret it? The word there is read is anagonosis. It means how do you interpret what you have read? And we all have different kind of interpretations of different ways.

How do you interpret it?

Verse 27, Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind. But it doesn't stop there.

He goes on to add this, and your neighbor as yourself. Now, I can love the Lord, but I struggle with my neighbor.

Not really, but anyway, that sounds good anyway. I still do. Susan we struggle with our neighbor, don't we? Because he's got his own way. He's from Chicago.

And how can you love anybody from Chicago?

He has a different way. He doesn't go to church, he doesn't want to go to church. He doesn't have any sense of church about him, about the Christian life about him. But here's the problem. God told me to love him.

Now I can interpret it, saying, I love him by throwing things over at his house.

But here's the real interpretation. And Jesus gives the lawyer the real interpretation. Jesus said, you've answered correctly, you've given the right answer.

I think the sin of the church is we have right answers, but we're not using them and putting action to them when they ought to be put in action to. And somehow we've built in some kind of validation.

Here's a guy that's off limits. This is a person that's off limits, or she is off limits, that I can still love God and still love her or him.

But fact, they're my neighbor.

I can walk away from that. But it shows that I really do not love God. So Jesus could tell this man was having a problem with that kind of interpretation. Because, you see, he was a Pharisee and he didn't like the Samaritans. And the Samaritans were people he couldn't get along with.

They had had this history of all kinds of problems down through the ages. So he thinks he can love God and not love the Samaritans. Or at least he set himself up for that kind of justification. And it's called a limited justification, limited compassion. And I can still love God and not care about the person that's across the street from me.

And you can't do the both of those. In fact, how you love the person across the street and how you love the person that's obnoxious and hard to get along with has a lot to do with how you love God now. So Jesus saw it was going nowhere, so he thought, I'll do a parable. And he was so great with parables. And I love the way he tells stories.

And Luke loves those stories, too. He writes more of Jesus Parables than any other writer. He just really likes those stories. I grew up listening to stories. My granddaddy was a station master, and he and I would sit on the back porch after we'd been fishing, and he would tell me stories of being a station master in Jackson, Alabama.

And he told me about the fact that they got in the station, they got this casket, and the casket was there, and. And so he called the church to come and pick up the casket. And so the church sent their deacons to pick up the casket. He also had a guy who was training, and he was training, and he was a vanquiloquist. Can you figure that for me?

He could throw his voice. Is that a good way to say it? So they came and picked up the casket, and the guy, ventriloquist, he threw his voice and he said, handle me easy, boys.

And they looked at each other and they set that casket down, and they went over and had a prayer meeting.

They said, let's give it another try. So went over and picked up the casket. When they picked up the casket, he threw his voice again, said, handle me easy, boys. And so they got together and walked out of the station, never came back to pick up that casket.

And my granddaddy would entertain me with that. And I listened to every word. But, see, Jesus, parables are not entertainment.

Here's this guy who thinks he's interpreted everything right, but his assumptions are all wrong.

And we have the wrong assumptions. We come with the wrong conclusion.

So there was a man that came down, and you know the parable. Well, the man came down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and Susan and I have been there, and you watch where that is. We were looking at it from Jericho up there, and it's about 30 miles, and it winds around like this.

Just wanted to wake you up. So if you see there as it winds around is all the place for robbers and desert thieves and all those kind of people.

And so they jumped on this merchant that was coming down from Jerusalem to Jericho. And as he's coming down, they beat him badly. Not only beat him badly, they took away all of his clothes, took away all of his money, and left him there to die. And that's all they cared about. And, you know, we live in a world of people who say, what's yours is mine and I'll take it.

And there are a lot of hackers in this world that will hack different people for their Social Security number, whatever, in their savings. And you got to be really careful. And we've had several people in our church that fell to Internet hackers, and they thought they were very good. But they think about things that they will do to you to rob you of all your savings. And you wonder about that when you answer that phone or when you answer your phone.

You wonder about the person who has written those things across there. And they're very smart and they're very dangerous, and they say, what's yours is mine and I'll take it. And they will take it. And what bothers me is as a generation and AI and all that that's going out there, and all my grandchildren are coming up in that kind of world, and it bothers me. And I ask God to really take care of them and bless him.

So here's a man that's half dead and he's on the side of the road. If he doesn't get any help, it doesn't tell us whether he's a Jew or Gentile. Doesn't tell us anything about him. He's just a human being and he's on the side of the road and he's going to die unless he has some kind of help.

Two religious people come down. You know the story. It's a priest has maybe come and he's been worshiping in Jerusalem at the temple. There's a Levite who is in charge of all the services that happen there. And both of them are people that everybody is Jewish, looks up to them.

And they get there and they see, if you look at the word, the word is blepo. They're not just walk by. They see this man, they see his condition. It's obvious that he needs help. They see him, but nothing happens on the inside.

See, that's where God's love happens. It happens on the inside of our heart.

And when they looked at him, and so maybe they felt threatened by the moment. If all these robbers came and did what they did to this man, then maybe they will come and do the very same thing to me.

And so they walked by on the other side.

But here's the need. There's a need, but they ignored it and they walked away from it. God's love will never let you walk away from the need of the moment. They walked away.

What's yours is mine and I'll take it. What's mine is mine and I'll keep it.

And they walk away.

But there's this another guy, and he's a Samaritan. The Samaritan was a person the Jewish Lauder hated.

They wouldn't even be in the same house with each other. They would not eat with each other, they would not worship with each other. They went to different places to worship. They built their own worship places so they could hold on to their assumptions and still have somewhere where they worship. But is that true worship?

So the Samaritan comes and this is what happens to the Samaritan. If you look at your Bible, he not only followed the steps of the previous ones, but he looked at him also.

Something happened on the inside.

That's where God's love abides. And what happens to him is a Greek word. I'm going to throw it out to you so you can handle it. I know you can handle it. The word is spliknoi.

Are you there? You really for that? Spliknoi is really translated means gut issue. And what remains? Something happens to this man on the inside and he cannot walk away.

God's love won't let him walk away. And this is what he does. He loves a man back to life. That's what God does. He loves a person back to life.

Now the person can refuse it, but it's in mine, in your hands to love somebody the way God has loved us. And that's what genuine love is.

Now Jesus will not let that go by. He turns to the lawyer who's got his own interpretation, who hated Samaritans. And all of a sudden the Samaritan is a hero of the story, man. Jesus dude knew how to write a story.

Which one had God's love in his heart?

The one who showed him splinknowing compassion.

He said, go and do likewise. And it's so important that this happened when Jesus headed to the cross because the church is going to have that responsibility to spread out through the whole world. People who were different denomination, different people, different understandings. There would be a whole Greek world out there. And this appealed to Luke more than anybody else because Luke had a Greek mindset and he was a Greek who was brought in to a Jewish world.

So here's some kind of understandings get from there, just kind of conclusions about this story and what it can mean to you and me. It is wrong to do nothing when something needs to be done.

Can I share that with you? It is wrong to do nothing when something needs to be done.

And maybe God has put something on our hearts and something. When we hear that on our hearts and we do nothing about it, there's this coldness of Satan that kind of comes in and just freezes our hearts.

And it's not eternal life.

It's wrong to do nothing. When something needs to be done. Second thing is, eternal life is not only out there. One of these days when we're giving our heart to Jesus and we've taken our last breath, it happens here, now. It doesn't have the permanence to it that it will.

One of these days in heaven, there's not going to be any hurricanes in heaven. Amen. There's not going to be any shortage of electricity. Amen. And I can watch my football games.

And Lawrence Welk. I just really go for Lawrence Welk. Old people like Lawrence Welk. Okay. Better than Taylor Swift, anyway.

So much for that.

God gives us those kingdom moments that we feel his presence and when heaven comes down and glory fills our soul. And we remember those because life moves on. But we can have those kind of eternal life moments that tells us God has an even better one in the days to come.

One final kind of story that I like to tell is when I was in the church, one church that I was in, there was a girl named Judy. And that's not her name, but I use that name. And Judy was so good with the children. That was her blessing. That was her gift.

She had a gift. She is delighted in just seeing those kids squeal and just enjoyed that. And great, Mommy. She delighted in sitting down and reading stories to those kids. And that just blessed our heart.

Blessed her heart. Judy grew up in church. She had church as a part of her life. It was very much a part of her life. And she grew up as being a fine Christian lady and going to church on a regular kind of basis.

When she went to college, she went another route. And when she went to college, she got involved with the wrong kind of group and she just did some things she should not have done.

But those kind of things, again, they have their guilt moments and they come back and they snatch your attention and kind of hold your attention.

And she loved those kids, but she also. She was married and she had two kids. But she kept wondering, how am I going to ever tell my girls about what happened to me and how I did the wrong kind of things and how those wrong kind of things just clamped around my heart and wouldn't let me go.

And so she came to see me and I said, gee, let's go in the sanctuary. So we get in the sanctuary and just kind of picture this kind of like this. And we sat on the front row and I said, now, Judy, I'm going to pray for you.

I don't hear all those things that's between you and God.

But I'm gonna pray for you.

And when I get through praying, I'm gonna walk to the back and I'm gonna stand at that back door. Not let anybody here in this sanctuary but you and God.

So I prayed for her. She started off sitting on the front row, but then she got down to where the altar would be.

She was sobbing.

Don't know what she was sobbing. Know that she and God were having one of those God filled moments.

It was about 30 minutes, 40 minutes. I stood back.

Finally she got up and she walked back to where I was. There was this glow. I can't tell you, it was this glow.

And all that contamination found redemption in her time with Jesus Christ.

And the guilt was gone. I asked her, I said, what are you going to do now? She says, man, I can't wait to teach those kids some more.

You see, when I used to teach them, I did it out of all this guilt that kind of hung around me. And I was trying to teach them so that maybe I could get rid of the guilt.

But now I can teach because I was free. I was set free of the guilt. And there's a new me and it doesn't have its claim on my life like it used to have. You see, I was in the ditch and God brought me out of the ditch and he set me free.

The worst kind of religion, the worst kind of religion is when God does something for you, blesses you and me, and we refuse to do it for others.

Now, would you bow your heads for just a moment?

Different needs, different places, different hearts.

The law. You had the sense to step out upon Jesus teaching. It's a command, go and do likewise. It's a command. It's not a suggestion.

It's a command. Go and do likewise. Maybe there are some things that you need to just empty with God.

Judas never asked for forgiveness, never asked for forgiven. But there's a chance for you and for me. God forgive us whatever guilt you have in your life. And all of us have some kind of guilt that's there, but you just take it to the Lord for just a moment.

It's prayer.

It's prayer that comes from the soul.

And you can have your eternal life. Moment of cleansing.

I pray this in Jesus name, Amen.